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The Political Economy of Resource Conflicts and Forced Migration Societies Without Borders Volume 12 Article 16 Issue 1 Human Rights Attitudes 2017 The olitP ical Economy of Resource Conflicts and Forced Migration: Why Afghanistan, Colombia and Sudan Are the World's Longest Forced Migration Tarique Niazi PhD University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, [email protected] Jeremy Hein PhD University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/swb Part of the Human Rights Law Commons, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Niazi, Tarique & Jeremy Hein. 2017. "The oP litical Economy of Resource Conflicts and Forced Migration: Why Afghanistan, Colombia and Sudan Are the World's Longest Forced Migration." Societies Without Borders 12 (1). Available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/swb/vol12/iss1/16 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Cross Disciplinary Publications at Case Western Reserve University School of Law Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Societies Without Borders by an authorized administrator of Case Western Reserve University School of Law Scholarly Commons. Niazi and Hein: The Political Economy of Resource Conflicts and Forced Migration: The Political Economy of Resource Conflicts and Forced Migration: Why Afghanistan, Colombia and Sudan Are the World’s Longest Forced Migration Crises Tarique Niazi, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Jeremy Hein, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire ABSTRACT Afghanistan, Colombia, and Sudan are the world’s three longest producers of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). Why? To answer this question, we evaluate the conventional and dominant geopolitical model of forced migration, as well as alternative models that focus on resource-based conflicts and political economy. We demonstrate that in each of the three cases, natural resources are at the heart of the conflicts that precede the involuntary movement of people both across international borders (refugees) and within national borders (IDPs). But the presence of resources by itself does not cause conflicts or forced migration. In Afghanistan, Colombia and Sudan, it is the political economy of resources--the ways in which these resources are accessed, appropriated, produced, distributed, and transported--that generates the conflicts which create refugees and IDPs. We conclude that alternative models of forced migration are important to policy-making and planning at the regional, national, and global levels in order to reduce the underlying causes of forced migration. Keywords: Afghanistan, Colombia, Sudan, Political Economy, Resource Conflicts, Forced Migration, Taliban, FARC I. INTRODUCTION Scholars of the nation-state have done a remarkable job of describing and explaining forced migration and their analyses shapes global, regional and national policies (Betts 2009; Crepeau et al. 2006; Gatrell 2013; Martin and Aeinikof 2013). The nation-state model combines multiple disciplines, ranging from political science, international relations, and sociology to the study of ethnicity and nationalism (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Loescher 2016). This scholarship defines the dominant paradigm in forced migration studies that uses geopolitics as the primary or even exclusive explanatory mechanism. This explanatory model offers a macro-causal understanding of forced migration based on ethnic strife, civil wars and intra-state conflicts in general (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Loescher 2016). While these explanations appear in a wide-range of empirical settings, variables such as tribalism and nationalism risk overemphasizing the primordial origin of conflicts, and as a result make them seem inevitable, i.e., deterministic (Morland 2014). More recently, alternative approaches have been deployed to explain forced migration in a different disciplinary context: disaster and environmental studies. Of these, the resource conflict approach and the environmental and climatic migration hypothesis have gained cross-disciplinary appeal (see e.g., Bates 2002; El- Hinnawi 1985; Homer-Dixon 1999; 1994; Hugo 1996; McAdam 2014; Myers 2001; 1997). In general, the natural resource conflicts model explains forced migration due to natural scarcities, natural disasters and more recently extreme climatic events (see e.g., McAdam 2014). El-Hinnawi (1985) developed the early environmentally driven migration thesis that emphasized the impact of environmental degradation on forced migration and its victims were labeled “environmental refugees.” El-Hinnawi (1985:4) first called attention to and defined environmental refugees as "those people who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a marked environmental disruption (natural and/or triggered by people) that jeopardized their existence and/or seriously affected the quality of their life." Subsequent research identified the most common types of environmental disruption that force people to change residence, including deforestation, rising sea levels, desertification, and droughts (Hugo 1996; Myers 1997; Suhrke 1994). Natural disasters continue to be one of the leading explanations for forced migration (Bates 2002; Myers 2001; Stojanov 2012). Homer-Dixon (1999; 1994) explains conflicts due to falling natural resource inventory and rising human population. He argues that resource scarcities trigger a scramble for resource-capture and thus conflicts. He attributes resource scarcity to individual agency or personal choices in determining family size, the sum total of which, in his view, grows into demographic overload causing resource scarcity and triggering resource conflict. Homer-Dixon (1999) partially attends to the structural scarcities as well, but foresees a preventive in a strong state to keep resource scarcities from erupting into active or armed conflicts. The strong state proposition is, however, problematic from the human rights perspective, and could become a source of forced migration in its own right. More importantly, Homer-Dixon’s (1999; 1994) neo-Malthusian argument over-emphasizes individual agency in contrast to a more structural analysis (Hobson, Bacon, and Cameron 2014; Freudenburg, Gramling, Laska, and Erickson 2009; El-Hinnawi 1985). Nonetheless, his major contribution lies in prioritizing the causality of resource scarcity in social conflicts. In his view, the presence of resources as a factor in a conflict is sufficient to define that conflict a resource-based conflict. Scholars in the political economy tradition see the limitations of the resource-based conflict approach and the disaster-driven environmental migration thesis. Many "natural disasters," they argue, are in fact not caused by 1 Published by Case Western Reserve University School of Law Scholarly Commons, 2017 1 Societies Without Borders, Vol. 12, Iss. 1 [2017], Art. 16 “nature” but by human economic and political agency (see, McAdam 2014; Hobson et al. 2014; Freudenberg et al. 2009). Hobson et al. (2014) argue that “natural disasters” are actually “natural hazards” that underinvestment in human security converts into disasters. Freudenburg et al. (2009) explain this phenomenon by arguing that if cities are built in the bed of rivers (such as New Orleans) or on the known fault-lines (such as Los Angeles and San Francisco), the resultant disasters cannot be described “natural.” In fact, environmental degradation per se is not “the” cause of forced migration or environmental refugees. Political and economic interests often benefit from ecologically destructive but economically profitable (at least in the short run) behaviors that often end when masses of people are forced to migrate (Freudenburg, et al. 2009). Ecologically informed political economy can reverse environmental degradation or lead to policies that positively shape land use behavior and land appropriation in general to preempt land degradation and consequent forced migration (Hobson, et al. 2014; Freudenburg et al. 2009). Similarly, a number of environmental sociologists in the tradition of ecological Marxism (see e.g., Buttel 2001; O’Conner 1997; Benton and Redclift 1994; Schnaiberg 1980) have made use of the political economy approach to explain macro-sociological and macro-ecological phenomena, including but not limited to the capitalist economy and its impact on nature and the natural world, as well as their human dependents. This model explains the interactive relationship between natural and social realities that produce environmental inequality and environmental classism (O’Conner 1997; Schnaiberg 1980) to which environmental racism has been recently added. The model argues that natural resource depletion is a function of dominant political and economic interests and the ways in which they access, appropriate, produce distribute and ship natural resources that trigger conflicts. Borrowing from Marx, Schnaiberg (1980) described an endless cycle of production and consumption as the "treadmill of production" (TOP), while O’Conner (1997) calls resource degradation and depletion the "second contradiction of capitalism," the first being overproduction. All these phenomena inspired what Homer-Dixon (1999; 1994) characterizes as a scramble for “resource capture.” Peluso and Watts (2001) focus on the seizure of resources that become violent, and argue that the political economy approach to resource-conflicts is relatively more comprehensive than other models in that (a) it recognizes the presence of natural resources as a (and not "the") cause of
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